My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain (12 page)

My sister was standing beside the coffee machine at one end of the hallway in the intensive care unit and spoke only when I finished telling her about my father’s file. He participated in the search for Burdisso but he did it on his own, not getting involved in the other efforts, she told me. He looked in places that didn’t interest the police, like gullies and streams, and beneath collapsed bridges; also in abandoned houses at the crossroads of country roads. Maybe he was already sick then, or maybe he got sick because of what happened. He talked of nothing else during all the weeks the search went on. I asked my sister why my father had gotten involved in a search for someone he barely knew, but my sister interrupted me with a gesture and said: He knew him; they went to school together at some point. For how long, I asked. My sister shrugged: I don’t know, but once he told me that
he regretted not having spoken to Burdisso about his sister while he was still alive, that he occasionally saw him on the street and always thought about approaching him to ask if he knew anything about her, but he couldn’t think of a good way to start the conversation and ended up just letting it go. Who is Fanny, I asked. My sister thought for a minute: She’s a distant relative of Burdisso. He tried to convince her to intervene in the trial as a civilian plaintiff to speed it along. What made him want to look for the missing girl, I asked, but my sister brought the cup of coffee to her lips, took a sip and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. It’s cold, she murmured and took another coin out of her pocket and put it into the machine and said, as if continuing a previous conversation: You saw him in the museum. Who, I asked. My sister said my father’s name. They interviewed him for an exhibition in the municipal museum; you should go see it, she added, and I nodded in silence.

When I entered the museum, I paid my admission and looked around for the exhibition on the local daily press. The museum brought together various insignificant miscellanea, the odds and ends of a mercantile city that lacked any history beyond the
fluctuating prices of the grains unloaded over the years in its port, the only justification for its existence in that spot beside a river, not two kilometers farther south or north or any other place at all. As I walked through the museum, I thought about how I’d lived in that city and how at some point it had been the place where I was supposedly going to remain, permanently tied down by an atavistic force that no one seemed able to explain but that affected many people who lived there, who hated it vehemently and yet never left, a city that wouldn’t release its hold on those born there, who traveled and came back or who never went anywhere and tanned in the summer and coughed in the winter and bought houses with their wives and had kids who were never able to leave the city either.

In the room that held the exhibition on the daily press there was a television on a constant loop, and a chair. I sat in it trembling, listening to data and figures and watching the front pages of newspapers until my father appeared on the screen. He was as I remembered him in his last years. He had a long white beard, which he occasionally ran his fingers through with a flirtatious air, and he talked about newspapers where he’d worked, newspapers
he’d seen go under and reappear with other names and other staffs in other places that, invariably, were finished off by the courts soon afterward, so the newspapers went under again and the cycle repeated itself from the beginning, if there ever was one; a whole series of pretty terrible cycles of exploitation and unemployment following one after another without leaving any room for a career or for hope. My father told his story, which was also the story of the press in this city where he’d decided to live, and I, watching him on the screen at that museum exhibition, felt both pride and very strong disappointment, the same disappointment I usually felt when I thought about everything my father had done and the impossibility of following in his footsteps or of offering him achievements that could match his own, which were many and were counted in newspaper pages, in journalists trained by him who in turn had trained me and in a political history that I had once known and then tried to almost completely forget.

I watched the documentary that included the interview with my father three or four times that afternoon, listening to him attentively until I’d familiarized myself with all the dates and names
but, more crucially, until looking at him started to be too terrible. I’m going to start crying, I thought, but thinking about it was enough to keep me from doing it. At some point an employee came in and announced that the exhibition would be closing in five minutes, and then he approached the television and turned it off. My father was cut off in the middle of a sentence, and I tried to finish it but couldn’t: where my father’s face had been I began to see mine, reflected in the black screen with all my features gathered in an expression of pain and sadness that I’d never seen before.

Once my father told me that he would have liked to write a novel. That night, at his desk, in a room that had once been mine and that never seemed to have enough light, I wondered if he hadn’t actually done it. Among his papers was a list of names laid out in two columns, colored lines linking them in which red predominated. There was also a page from a newspaper, the front page of a local newspaper called
Semana Gráfica
that I knew—because I’d once heard my father say it, and what he’d said, particularly the pride with which he’d said it, had survived the almost total collapse of my memory—was a newspaper he’d created as a teenager and that
had been his first job in journalism, long before he went to a city in the heart of the country to study that discipline. There were also photographs, and perhaps these were the materials for the novel my father had wanted to write and never did.

What must the novel my father wanted to write have been like? Brief, composed of fragments, with holes where my father couldn’t or didn’t want to remember something, filled with symmetries—stories duplicating themselves over and over again as if they were an ink stain on an assiduously folded piece of paper, a simple theme repeated as in a symphony or a fool’s monologue—and sadder than Father’s Day at an orphanage.

One thing was clear: the novel my father would have written wouldn’t have been an allegory or domestic fiction or an adventure or a romance, it wouldn’t have been a ballad or a coming-of-age novel, it wouldn’t have been a detective novel or a fable or a fairy tale or historical fiction, it wouldn’t
have been a comic novel or an epic or a fantasy, not a gothic or an industrial novel; it certainly wouldn’t have been a realist novel or a novel of ideas or a postmodern novel, not a newspaper serial or a novel in the nineteenth-century style; and there’s no way it would have been a parable or science fiction, suspense or a social novel, a novel of chivalry or a bodice-ripper; while we’re at it, it probably wouldn’t have been a mystery or a horror novel either, even though those would cause the right amount of fear and grief.

Among my father’s papers I found a paid announcement from the Argentine newspaper
Página/12
dated Thursday, June 27, 2002. The text of the announcement:

To the right of the text there was a photograph of a young woman. She had an oval face framed by thick black hair, her thin eyebrows prominent and her large eyes heavily outlined in eyeliner, not looking at the viewer but beyond, at someone or something located to the right and above wherever the anonymous photographer was when he or she took the picture of this woman, her thin lips twisted into an expression of interrogatory seriousness. There was no reason to doubt that the woman in the photograph was Alicia Raquel Burdisso; what’s more, everything seemed to point to that, but her gaze and her unusual seriousness made it seem as if she were no twenty-five-year-old but rather a woman who had seen many things and decided to press on toward them, someone who could barely stop for a second to pose for a photograph, a person who concentrated so intensely on that point above her that, if asked in the moment she was being photographed, she would hardly have been able to give her name or home address.

Then there were other photographs. The first showed a dozen young people sitting around a table with two bottles of wine, one of which was still unopened, and some glasses. Not all the young people looked at the photographer; only the one to the left of the young man who is my father, and two women standing behind him. A series of details, particularly the bars on a window, made me realize that the young people were in the living room of my paternal grandparents’ house; two of them are holding guitars: my father, whose left hand is positioned in what seems to be an E chord at the top of the instrument’s neck, and a young woman who seems to be playing a C minor chord—it also could be G-sharp minor; the lack of capo makes it hard to be sure—and looks toward the right of the photograph. My father and another young man are wearing plaid shirts; another, stripes; two women are wearing the kind of floral dresses common in the 1960s; two women have straight hair and another sports a haircut à la Jeanne Moreau. My father wears his hair long for the period, and a bushy beard that shows only his chin, which he must have shaved. Behind this group of young people is a chalkboard on which someone has written:
“
Semana Gráfica
, a year of venom.” On the right side of the photograph is a young woman who is smiling and looking forward and seems to be singing. It’s Alicia Raquel Burdisso.

Another photograph showed the same group of young people, joined by another, probably the photographer of the previous image, in the courtyard of my grandparents’ house. One of them is smoking. My father smiles. Alicia leans on the shoulder of one of the women, who blocks her almost completely.

A third photograph showed them horsing around. My father is wearing some sort of helmet and holding up one wrist; Alicia is to his right and wears a straw hat and a flower in her hair; she is smoking and, for the first time in the series of photographs, laughing. The photograph is dated November 1969.

If you have a digital copy of the photograph, as I do, and if you enlarge it again and again, as my father did, the woman’s face breaks down into a multitude of gray squares until the woman literally disappears.

My father had even written a brief biographical summary of the people linked with arrows on the first page of the file: there were names and dates and names of political parties and groups that no longer existed and whose memory reached me like the imaginary voices of the dead in a séance. My father’s list included a dozen names, six of which were associated with names of political organizations. Then my father had included some photocopies of the first page of the publication he ran, and highlighted in yellow the names of people who appeared on the list. One of them was Alicia Raquel Burdisso, who, on my father’s list, was reduced to a single date, that of her birth; in place of the other was a question mark, but for me,
there and then, that question mark didn’t introduce a question but rather an answer, an answer that explained everything.

Next there was a printout, presumably from the Internet, with the photograph from the commemorative paid announcement in
Página/12
, and the following text:

On the same page was a statement in the form of a letter to Alicia, signed by René Nuñez:

Then, finally, there was a poem:

Maybe the poem was by Alicia Burdisso.

When I left the photographs on my father’s desk, I understood that his interest in what had happened to Alberto Burdisso was the result of his interest in what had happened to Alberto’s sister, Alicia, and that interest was in turn the product of a fact that perhaps my father couldn’t even explain to himself but, in trying to, he had gathered all those materials. This fact was, my father had gotten Alicia involved in politics without knowing that what he was doing would cost that young woman her life, would cost him decades of fear and regret and would have its effects on me, many years later. As I tried to shift my attention from the photographs I’d just seen, I understood for the first time that all the children of young Argentines in the 1970s were going to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought. But I also realized that there was no way of telling my father’s story as a mystery or, more precisely, that telling it in such a way would betray his intentions and his struggles, since telling his story as a detective tale would merely confirm the existence of a genre, which is to say, a convention, and all of his efforts were meant to call into question
those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.